8:53 AM Feb 18, 1994

'DON'T SHARPEN INIQUITOUS EDGE OF TRADE' - INDIA

Geneva 17 Feb (TWN) -- Indian Environment Minister Kamal Nath Thursday called for a moratorium on trade-environment linkages, except when the issue clearly impinges on collective ecological security and warned against sharpening the already iniquitous edge of trade on the developing world through hasty decisions on trade and environment .

Kamal Nath was speaking at the informal high-level meeting on environment and trade. In a prepared speech, a copy of which was made available to the press, he said trade actions were not necessarily the best way to address environmental concerns, since environmental effects flow from a multiplicity of causes.

"It would be a retrograde way of shaping environmental norms to allow dispute resolution panels of GATT to indicate the direction global environment should take -- not only retrograde but naive, because the roots of the linkage between trade and environment are not to be found in superficial assumptions, but go much deeper and are systemic," he said.

"There is a social and environmental subsidy that the industrialized countries are receiving from the developing countries, an insidious subsidy which rendered all development in the North unsustainable by definition," Kamal Nath said.

"It makes a mockery of free trade; and if we have to set things right, then the subsidy must be recognized and accounted for," he said. "The economic poverty and environmental degradation that afflicts the South is not simply coincident with the affluence of the North. It is the poverty and degradation visited upon the South by the affluence of the North. The banishing of this impoverishment is crucial to everyone's survival. If the barrier on this road to survival is to be removed, we will have to go beyond superficialities in this debate...Intuitively, I am sure all of us know exactly what is going on. But too many of us remain silenced by the subtle authoritarianism of economics."

Kamal Nath complained that some eco-labelling schemes in western countries gave value only to environment friendly chemical dyes and ignored completely natural dyes, even if they were equally, if not more ecologically sound. Asian countries, major manufacturers and exporters of textiles cannot earn ecolabels which were rightfully theirs and, forced into a concern, might feel that the minimum risk lay in using technology of a country that was a potential importer.

Thus the importing country would find a market for, or atleast collecting rent on a technology which might not even be appropriate for the producing country.

Kamal Nath also spoke of the wide scope for countries to set arbitrary trade barriers in the name of environment or health, and often extended by "stretched logic" to monitor the processes by which the exported goods were produced, and thus subtly influencing national policies of countries.

Environmentally harmful processes should be stopped and over-exploitation of non-renewable resources should be controlled, but the solutions did not lie in unilateral trade bans.

International ecolabelling based on processes amounted to legitimization of extra-territorial interference and "a kind of green imperialism", Kamal Nath said.

The South as a whole favoured trade, not trade favours, and there should be a moratorium on linking trade with environment unless the issue clearly impinged on collective ecological security, and even then only dealt with multilaterally.

"Let not plain protectionism be passed off as environmental concern. We are not ready to allow GATT or any other forum -- trade or otherwise -- to review national development priorities...Environmental action has to flow out of free will in an atmosphere of shared global concern..Historically, the hand on the South has been harsh. The very inter-generational equities we talk of in current environmental debates must have some bearing on the past too. While we cannot and must not appropriate from future generations, we cannot brush aside misappropriation by past generations.

"The issue of trade and sustainable development will be discussed long and hard, here and in many forums in the near future. Whatever words we may use to sugar-coat or explain it away, the fact remains that trade has had a sharply iniquitous edge. Let not this edge be sharpened by hasty decisions in establishing a nexus between trade and environment, rather than making them mutually supportive."